 YouTube made some policy changes back in November of last year that they are seemingly enforcing right now out of nowhere. Most of these changes without warning YouTubers and some of these changes specifically involving gaming YouTube channels such as myself. You probably have heard a little bit about the situation or at least seen various videos pop up because many content creators have talked about it. Not only live streamers but even some of us news channels have at least covered this story. I think it's interesting because it puts YouTube in this really weird situation where they don't want you making content for kids but then they also want your content to be friendly for kids. And all of this really stems from the fact that what YouTube is trying to do is at least maintain its ability to, you know, keep the money flowing, right? All of these changes are always about pleasing advertisers and you might go, why do they care so much about that? Well YouTube doesn't really make Google a bunch of money. In fact, if you actually dig through the financials for YouTube, you'll find out that YouTube for the most part just breaks even. So if there's anything happening that's going to cause them to lose advertisers, then eventually they stop breaking even and YouTube becomes a loss leader. Now I don't think that that means YouTube would go away. They're owned by Google. Who's owned by Alphabet. They are one of the largest and richest companies in the world. And YouTube is literally the number two most visited website and platform on the entire planet right behind Google.com. And then obviously in terms of applications, I think TikTok is now more downloaded and more used than YouTube, but YouTube is still right up there. They're not going to just stop supporting YouTube because it's not making money, but they clearly want to make moves that are going to ensure YouTube's longevity and doing things and making policy changes to ensure that they can continue that ad revenue coming in is well to the benefit of YouTube and arguably to the benefit of us creators because hey, if we're able to get bigger and better companies buying ads on YouTube, that should lead to us making more money. At least that's sort of the idea. The problem YouTube obviously has is two fold. You can't say don't make content for kids. Meanwhile, make your content friendly for kids. Those are two contradicting points and YouTube does a very poor job communicating these changes and then making us understand how these changes will actually affect videos with real world examples. They pretty much never do that. And what's interesting is when there is something important that they want to note to creators, they literally put it in the back end. This is something they put in the back end today that addresses a view issue I was having yesterday with my content where they acknowledge, hey, you know what, this is a known problem. You know what you should also put back here? Nome policy changes that may affect my channel, but they don't do that. They hide everything on their blog. Now it's known by some of us that they do put these policy changes on their blog, but still it's not always the easiest blog to follow. It's like a Q&A blog and unless you're looking for specific things, you're probably not likely to find it. And this is just fundamental to YouTube's bad communication with those content creators. So this is what the update said back in November of 2022. We've updated our guidelines to include both clear language and specific guideline changes and changes to add suitabilities. See below for impacted guidelines as well as non exhaustive examples of what is changing. So adult content, thumbnails, titles and videos containing sexualized texts such as links, 18 plus, obscene language, images such as real or animated, minimally covered butts, audio such as the sharing of sexual tips or working experiences and gratifying acts such as animal mating or implicit sexual acts may not receive ad revenue. So they're not getting rid of your videos, but no ads. In my experience, videos not having ads leads to a significantly less views because YouTube is less incentivized to push that content. Policy enforcement around classical arts depicting sexual activities, sensual dancing, sexual education without intent to arouse. Audiences remain unchanged and may receive ad revenue. So there's going to be a lot of discretion applied. Most of this for the most part has nothing to do with us as like video game content creators. So we're going to kind of let that policy go. Sort of makes sense. They're trying to avoid YouTube becoming like a porn website. And next thing you know, advertisers will pull out significantly. Next up, violence. Non graphic dead bodies presented without any context. Game violence directed at real named persons or acts that are manufactured to create shocking experiences such as brutal mass killing, you could argue games that call a duty sort of push that implied moment of death, such as bombing a building with people inside. Again, video games have that it's especially in all of the military shooters may not receive ad revenue. Standard gameplay or gory injuries are present after the first eight seconds. Non graphic strategies after their aftermath such as footage of a town flooded or police seizures as part of a law enforcement may receive ad revenue. So as long as you stay out of some mystery eight second window, you can have some stuff, but there's also limitations because it can't represent the idea of mass killing of people, which is something that does exist in several military games. All right, harmful or dangerous acts. The dangerous acts where minors are participants or victims, such as minors participating in experiments or challenging of all stunts unsuitable for kids may not receive ad revenue. Again, really strange because you're saying not suitable for kids. When you told us we can't make content for kids, or we also don't receive ads. What is it YouTube? Can we make content that isn't for children and receive ads? Or does all of our content need to be targeted to children? And then we have to tell you it's not for kids when there's actually a checkbox when we upload our videos, or we have to select if our video is intended for children or not. If our content is not intended for children, we can receive ad revenue. If it is intended for children, we cannot receive ad revenue and we cannot have comments on our videos. And yet you put a policy in place right here. Challenges involving stunts unsuitable for kids may not receive ad revenue. But in order to get ad revenue, you need to be making content that isn't for children in the first place. Do you see the conundrum here? YouTube's trying to please advertisers making your content more kid friendly, but we're not supposed to make our content for kids. It's a really weird catch 22 situation, in my opinion. Sensitive events. We're going to kind of skip over that. That has to do more with politics and news and religion and all that. In appropriate language, though, this is one that's getting a lot of people right now. Our approach to profanity is changing. All varieties of profanity are now treated equally, meaning they are not differentiated based on levels of severity. For example, light, moderate, strong or extreme. And we are not treating hell and damn as profanity anymore. Well, thanks. You took two words that aren't profanity and you're just not calling them profanity because hell and damn are not profane words, in my opinion. Anyways, therefore, profanity used in the title thumbnails or in the titles for seven seconds or used consistently throughout the video may not receive ad revenue. Of course, they have no examples of what consistently means. How many times do you have to use it? If you have a swear word once every minute, is that too much? Again, they don't really explain it. Profanities used after the first eight seconds may receive ad revenue. Our position on not monetizing content with profanity throughout or compromise the majority of the video is not changing. Again, they don't really explain it. And really what's happened is a bunch of live streamers. For the most part, I've had a lot of their older content unmonetized because they are blanket applying this to previous content, which happened under other policies. And you know, this is where people are looking forward and wondering what's next. What's YouTube going to do? YouTube's in this weird place. As I said, they're trying to please advertisers while also trying to please governing bodies who do not want YouTube to be targeting children, but yet they want your content to be friendly towards children. They basically want family friendly content intended for older than age 13 audiences will also be in friendly to people under age 13 on the off chance that someone younger than 13 sees your video. And that all makes it friendly to advertisers. Now, what I don't understand is why YouTube won't just let us rate our channels or have YouTube rate our channels for us as it's sort of like the ESRB rating or the TV rating right for everybody T for teen M for mature and allow advertisers to buy ads in various categories of family friendly to teens to news content to whatever. Look, these policy changes aren't going to affect me. You guys know already, I barely swear as it is in my normal video content. And I feel like I swear infrequently enough during live streams that I probably won't get dinged. I guess I can't guarantee it. I obviously don't participate in most of these violent acts. I guess it's arguable. Certain games I live stream once in a blue moon might be impacted, but I don't live stream enough of those games often enough to really be that concerned. I just think YouTube is stuck between a rock and a hard place. They're trying to avoid government interference and they're also trying to please advertisers and they're they're kind of two separate ideals when I feel like again the obvious answer is to just age rate our channels to certain groups and you don't base how you spread your videos on that. You base that on the age of the actual user. So as an example, if I rate my channel for T and above, then you should be targeting my videos towards people that according to the profiles anyways are 13 and older. If it is a channel that is for children and families, obviously maybe you brought in that to all age groups. Look, none of this is ideal, of course, because then you're limiting audience reach and some YouTubers will be mad about that as well. So there isn't really an ideal situation here other than maybe just being more transparent. Look, if you want YouTube to be a place that basically doesn't have profanity, I'm okay with that. I think when it comes to creating content or doing live reactions or all this stuff, there are ways to express ourselves in very serious tones where we don't have to swear even if that's common off of YouTube, but I also think that we need to keep in mind that YouTube is trying to maintain profitability of some level and also help support us creators by ensuring that we continue to have high quality ads which will lead to higher CPM, which lead to more money per video. So I am not YouTube. I don't care what YouTube does for the most part. Most of our policy changes don't affect us while we are targeted as an older audience. In fact, our primary age groups are between this ages of 18 and 45. It's a pretty wide range age group there, but that's literally where 90% of our audience resides. So we're already reaching an older audience as it is. But also I don't create the sort of content that I feel like YouTube policies ever really end up hurting. I just want them to communicate better. These policy changes were not even made aware to us. They were not presented on the back end. They never warned us. They just started demonetizing videos. And then you had to sort of search around to figure out what the hell is going on instead of YouTube actually telling us they could email us. They have all of our emails. They could tell us on the back end. There are so many different ways. I mean, some of us have MCNs. Our MCNs were unaware of these policy changes. That's crazy to me that literal people that are job to keep their content creators updated weren't aware of made aware of these policy changes. So look, YouTube, you need to get on top of this and just communicate better and give actual examples instead of saying, oh, if there's some profanity, but if there's too much profanity, show videos, have video examples of this is okay and this is not okay. Give better example. Don't just give us words. Give us real video examples of what's okay and what's not okay so we can better understand the policies. That's another thing I would suggest YouTube to do as well. Anyways, it's not going to affect my channel too much. It might affect yours. It might affect some of your favorite content creators and live streamers. Not really going to affect us. We're going to keep on trucking. In fact, we have another live stream going up tonight here in like two, three hours anyways. So anyways, I'll catch you guys there. Otherwise, I'll also see you tomorrow at our podcast and yet more video content during this rather dry news cycle. We don't have a lot of news here to kick off January, which is pretty typical from the big Nintendo. Thank you guys and I'll catch you later.